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The Web Security Mailing List

"So what do you do when you’re a couple of bored Russian immigrants
with some cool hacking skills and you want to make some money the easy
way?

Well, if you are Nicholas Lakes and Vaiachelav Berkovich you set
yourself up as a trucking company without any trucks and find an inside
track to the Department of Transportation website called Safersys.org.
This is the online listing of licensed interstate trucking companies
and brokers and it was this list that the intrepid duo would hack into
and change legitimate company information to addresses and phone
numbers that the pair controlled.

Once they had a company redirected to themselves they would do a hunt of the web-based load boards; which is where brokers advertise cargo in need of someone to transport them. As Kevin Poulsen on the Threat Level blog wrote about how the pair pulled it off

Posing as the legitimate company, the men then took to the web-based
“load boards” where brokers advertise cargo in need of transportation.
They’d negotiate a deal, for example, to transport cargo from American
Canyon, California to Jessup, Maryland for $3,500.

But instead of transporting the load, Lakes and Berkovich would
outsource the job to another trucking company, the feds say. Once the
cargo was delivered, the men allegedly invoiced their customer and
pocketed the funds. But when the company that actually drove the truck
tried to get paid, they’d eventually discover that the firm who’d
supposedly hired them didn’t know anything about it."